If you happened to miss Saturday's news, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence finally declassified conclusions on the Iraq-al'Qaida link. This committee is bipartisan with 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats. I've been reporting most of their conclusions since before the war and people always looked at me like I've been going on some madman conspiracy theory. But the facts have always been there. I think Tony Snow said it perfect when he referred to the report as "old news." True it's very old news except to the American public. So what was the Iraq-al'Qaida link?
According to a CIA paper drafted before the war, "Saddam has viewed Islamic extremists operating inside Iraq as a threat, and his regime since its inception has arrested and executed members of both Shia and Sunni groups to disrupt their organizations and limit their influence" (p 63). In January 2003 (two months before the war), the CIA concluded the "Saddam Husayn and Usama bin Ladin are far from being natural partners" (p 64) and "Saddam only expressed negative sentiments about bin Ladin" (p 67). At one point, "the Iraqi regime issued a decree aggressively outlawing Wahabism [the Islamic sect bin Laden belongs to] in Iraq and threating offenders with execution" (p 67).
You're probably telling your self this can't be true since al-Zarqawi was a major link between bin Laden and Saddam. Let's start with the bin-Ladin connection. The report states "al-Zarqawi had religious differences with bin Ladin's singular focus against the United States" and that "al-Zarqawi had rebuffed several efforts by bin Ladin to recruit him" (p 90). So that link has been decimated. What about the al-Zarqawi Saddam connection? Again,"documents seized after the war show that the IIS Headquarters [Saddam's intelligence service] passed a written order to track and capture al-Zarqawi and his associates" (p 91). Saddam saw al-Zarqawi as dangerous to his regime, not as an ally.
Again, all these facts have been reported again and again.
This Iraq-al'Qaida myth has been debunked by the 911 Commission Report, Defense Intelligence Report, British Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, Israel Intelligence, Senate Reports, Pentagon studies, and just about anyone who has taken two seconds to find the facts. So how does this myth keep prevailing? Dick Cheney, the very day after the Commission Report on the lack of connection, claimed this: "the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former head of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in a US air strike this year, was in Baghdad before the war was evidence that Iraq had links to al-Qaeda." Because Cheney said it, this was reported even though the claim has been investigated and debunked.
If your lazy you can just read the newspaper review of the document.
